ART REVIEW; In Civil Rights Ferment, A Conflicted Nostalgia

Kerry James Marshall, an artist based in Chicago, has described his work as history painting, and he has taken black life in America as his primary subject.

In the large-scale pieces he contributed to last year's Whitney Biennial, black children played in housing projects that resembled those he had lived in during the 1960's in Los Angeles. The settings were carefully detailed, but surreal. Urban buildings had the look of American-dream suburbs. Hallmark card sunrises and bluebirds filled the skies. But parts of the pictures were obliterated with smeared paint.

The emotional tone was complicated, at once sentimental and tough, mixing affection and reproach. It was as if each picture had started out as a fond, idealized depiction of a life remembered, then gradually turned into a disillusioned statement of a life denied.

In ''Kerry James Marshall: Mementos'' at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, these complexities deepen, formally and conceptually. For his first museum solo, the artist has moved into multimedia installation and has tackled the huge, and hugely conflicted, topic of the civil rights struggles of the 1950's and 60's.

As always with his work, history is both social narrative and personal experience. Mr. Marshall was born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955, the year the bus boycott began. He was a child there when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four girls, and when George Wallace prevented black students from entering the University of Alabama.

He lived in Los Angeles during the Watts riots and the shootout between the Black Panthers and the police. And all of these events were played out against the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, national catastrophes that charged an era with a mood of anger and grief.

The Brooklyn installation, organized by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, opens on a funerary note with a bannerlike commemorative painting. On a solid black field framed by a decorative border of gold glitter appear the portraits of the three dead leaders, accompanied by the words ''We Mourn Our Loss'' in Gothic script.

Similar pieces recur throughout the show, though no two are exactly alike. A portrait of Malcolm X is inserted in one. Another turns into a tribute to the artist's father. In a third, iconic faces are blotted out by a swipe of paint. Each panel also incorporates handwritten words in pencil and ballpoint pen -- Bible quotations, personal names, the initials of political groups -- like entries in a funeral parlor guest book or graffiti on a wall, history inscribed by whoever is passing through.

Words play an important role in Mr. Marshall's work. They appear in all of his paintings and they are the only images in a recent series of prints of civil rights era political slogans. They range from the pacifist anthem ''We Shall Overcome'' to the militant ''Burn, baby, burn'' and together chart the shifting political mood of a decade. Mr. Marshall created the prints with five-foot-high handstamps, and these appear in the show, like abstract sculptures, along with outsize ink pads in red, green and black, the colors of black nationalism.

Also included is a series of four paintings, each titled ''Souvenir,'' in the artist's signature format -- mural size, on unstretched canvas -- and they are extraordinary. In each, an orderly living room, carefully observed in every detail, is occupied by a middle-aged black woman. The scenes look straightforward enough except that the woman has angel's wings and is accompanied by apparitional presences.

In one painting, the faces of black musicians from the past float above her head; in another, the names of artists and writers who died in the 1960's: Zora Neale Hurston, Augusta Savage, Lorraine Hansberry and Bob Thompson among them. In a third, the ghostly portraits of Black Panthers and the four girls who died in the Birmingham church hover on high.

The title of the exhibition's centerpiece video work, ''Laid to Rest,'' seems to promise a resolution to the paintings' mix of regret and celebration. The film, which can be viewed only through eyeholes cut in the side of a wood enclosure painted as a mock-mausoleum, shows a wake in progress with an open coffin banked by flowers.

But the atmosphere is agitated. Animated images flash by in a quick-cut sequence over the bier, accompanied by an aggressive soundtrack of couples battling and drug deals being made. And over the coffin, above where the head would be, a pair of Lincoln pennies, intended to close the eyes of the corpse, spin in midair.

The image can have several meanings. Many of the problems addressed by the civil rights movement have not died; nor have the movement's heroic ghosts found repose, despite being enshrined in history books. The work they initiated needs to be advanced, just as the outsize handstamps, with their exhortations to action, need to be put to use.

They are being used, of course; the prints Mr. Marshall has included in the installation attest to that. And political changes stemming from the civil rights era are in progress, though often in subtle and oblique forms. Such changes are suggested in a group of small paintings that are not part of the installation, but hang in a gallery nearby.

Each is a three-quarter-length portrait of a single black sitter dressed in a traditional American scouting uniform. A Boy Scout in regulation beige looks out at the viewer, his head surrounded by a fiery halo. A Cub Scout den mother with close-cropped hair wears small gold rings in her nose and ears. A scoutmaster has an American flag stitched on his sleeve and his hand clenched in a fist.

Here, Mr. Marshall's complex historical perspective is distilled. In these portraits, time-honored American values -- community, leadership, duty -- that were also the bedrock of the early civil rights movement, are reconfirmed and radically recast. The scout figures wear familiar uniforms, but with a difference: as militant citizens claiming a place in the mainstream but sustaining a revolution within. It's a difficult position to negotiate, but a powerful one, and it seems to form the foundation for much of this challenging artist's work.